Incelosphere

The collection of communities, vlogs and blogs where incelospherians and cybercels gather is called the incelosphere. It is mostly confined to forums and Youtube. Abtreffers are arguably the most sophisticated community in the incelosphere. Among the most distinctive aspects of the incelosphere is the sheer amount of protologists and neologists who coin new words. The mere existence of the incelosphere has helped a lot of truecels overcome their depression, purely out of the knowledge that they're not alone, and that there are other truecels out there like themselves. There are scores, or perhaps even hundreds of vlogging channels, websites, and forums in the incelosphere.

This article discusses both the history of online spaces frequented by incels as well as forms of media that imbricate on this phenomenon.

Contents

The term 'involuntarily celibate' has been used in literature prior to the internet, and sometimes, but rarely even in a semi-academic way. It wouldn't be until the internet era that the term entered academia. Prior to the internet, the term, "involuntary celibate", was used in literature, including but not limited to, The Mythology and Fables of the Ancients, Explain'd from History, Volume 3 in 1739, Russia: or, A compleat historical account of all nations which compose that empire by Johann Gottlieb Gorgi in 1780 (makes explicit reference to polygyny among Uzbeks leading to widespread inceldom among men), Aparato a la historia eclesiastica de Aragon in 1791 by the enlightenment era Spanish historian Joaquin Traggia (referencing incel slaves), The Doctrine and Law of Marriage, Adultery and Divorce, 1826, by Hector Davies Morgan, M.A, Volume Six of the British satirical magazine Punch in 1844 (in the form of a satirical proposal to alleviate inceldom purportedly authored by a representative of the "Grand National Union Wife Agency and Assurance Company"), Family Herald Magazine in 1876, The Population Question According to T. R. Malthus and J. S. Mill by Charles Robert Drysdale in 1892, Virginia by Ellen Glasgow in 1913, The Great Unmarried by British Journalist Walter M. Gallichan in 1916, 'The Building by Peter Martin in 1960, in detail in Blueprint for a Higher Civilization by Henry Flynt in 1975, Law and Liberation by Robert E. Rhodes in 1986, Criminal Tendencies by William O'Rourke in 1987, Human Sexuality: the search for understanding by David Knox in 1984, and Understanding Sexuality by Adelaide Haas and Kurt Haas in 1990.

While never directly using the verbatim terms, "involuntarily celibate" or "incel," famous French author Michel Houellebecq has written about the topic vicariously through his many fictional works about involuntarily celibate and layless men. Famous English novelist and non-fiction writer George Orwell also briefly touched upon involuntarily celibate (without explicitly using the term) tramps in his book about the lives of the underclass, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933.

Additionally, the similar term "forced celibacy" has been used in ways nearly equivalent to the modern usage of the term "involuntary celibacy", most notably in Maximilien Misson's 1714 travelogue A New Voyage to Italy. With Curious Observations on Several Other Countries, where he talked of the relative freedoms English women had compared to Italian women at the time, who were described as being esconded away in their homes, to evade the depredations of "three quarters of the men living under the insupportable restraint of a forced celibacy, (who) would make a dreadful havoc of their neighbours property [...]"[1]

Some notable pre-internet people who were arguably incelibates include Ludwig van Beethoven who suffered serial rejection at the hands of women, Emily Dickinson who suffered from agoraphobia, Joseph Merrick aka the Elephant Man who suffered from severe face and body deformities, artist Van Gogh who was perpetually rejected and eventually pursued a relationship with a hooker, Van Gogh's famous painter manlet friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was severely mocked for being a manlet and eventually just chose to live in the brothel he frequented, Friedrich Nietzsche who was famously rebuffed by every woman he approached and was alleged to have died from syphilis contracted from a hooker,[2]G. H. Hardy a famous mathematician who couldn't bear looking at himself in the mirror and never held steady relationships with women, bisexual actor Anthony Perkins who for most of his life had a pathological fear of women remaining a virgin (at least to women) at age 39, Ed Gein who Perkins had played in the movie Psycho was terrified of human contact and probably died a virgin, and English recording artist Nick Drake who suffered from extreme shyness of women[3] and in all likelihood died a virgin (according to most analyses). Famous folk-pop singer and pianist Daniel Johnston was also a well-known incelibate. He was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia, and his songs detail his life in and out of mental hospitals, and debilitating unrequited love for various women. He may be the only famous modern pop musician to be an incelibate.

The founder of the particular strain of seduction techniques that we know today as modern pick-up-artistry was Ross Jeffries. He published "How to Get the Women You Desire Into Bed" in 1992, which argued against nice guy behavior. The alt.seduction.fast Usenet newsgroup was founded by Lewis De Payne, a student of Ross Jeffries in 1994. In the same year, Michel Houellebecq published his first novel, "Whatever", which frankly discussed sexual stratification and pauperization.

Although the term "incel" did exist in the late-90s, the most common term in the incelosphere used to refer to involuntarily celibate people in the 90s was, "socially anxious men," on the alt.support.shyness Usenet Group and "AFC" meaning "average frustrated chump" on the alt.seduction.fast (ASF) Usenet newsgroup. Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project abbreviated the word incel in 1997 which was initially coined by Antoine Banier which eventually cultivated into academic research on incels. This research was published and is colloquially known as the Donnelly Study referring to its main sociologist Denise Donnelly. The terms "incel" and "involuntary celibate" subsequently became valid sociological terms. A mailing list (forum) was created on the Project's site in 1997, the first official incel forum. In 1998, members of alt.support.shyness were invited, helping to populate the mailing list. Alana's mailing list was a feminist forum, and Alana had created the first incel forum as a lesbian with dating experience. Alana stopped maintaining the forum around 2003.

A year after Alana's first incel forum, in 1998, the first online German incel community, Parsimonyforum 3708 of the Absolute Beginners, was established.[5] In 1999, Laurence Fishburne whilst starring as Morpheus in the film The Matrix, narrates the line "You take the blue pill, the story ends here, you wake up and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill ... and I'll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes." This quote subsequently becomes eulogized with "blue pill" and "red pill" eventually becoming eponyms for entire philosophies in the incelosphere as well as adjacent communities.

In 2008, 4chan's r9k board appeared, a hikikomori board that never self-identified as incel, but male hikikomoris are generally involuntarily celibate. Since 2008, r9k defined most of what media as of 2018 refers to as "incel subculture." Also, in 2008, the first clip of the unreleased US incel documentaryThe Incel Project was uploaded to blip.tv. The developing documentary seemed to have stalled sometime between 2012-2014. In the same year, the vlogging community of the True Forced Loneliness 'movement' started, a space adjacent to incel boards that initially consisted of three vloggers and a website complaining about dating from a societal perspective. In 2009, love-shy.com came under the adminship of an extremely anti-feminist admin for a couple years. This is the same year that the PSL boards started, a sequential group of raucous forums that happened to contain a lot of involuntary celibates. r/ugly is a semi-incelospherian subreddit that was created in March 2009. The website loveshyproject.com was also created in 2009. The same year, the website Involuntarycelibacy.com was created.

In November 2017, reddit shut down the subreddit /r/incels, and a user from it, SergeantIncel, created the forum which is currently known as incels.co.

Incel.life was shut down in 2018, due to efforts by Babe Magazine. In early 2018, Alana decided to rebrand her abandoned research project to "Love not Anger," while claiming that the term "incel" has acquired negative connotations. Although the trueforcedloneliness.com website is no longer operational, there nevertheless are many sporadic blogs and vlogs wherein content creators self-identify as TFLers.

In 2018, Braincels was quarantined from Reddit on the basis of misogyny.

That year, the Washington Post and other outlets released articles detailing how rates of celibacy among men between ages 18-30 was approaching 30% per year (an all time high), validating the intuition of many incel forums, and ending some of the gaslighting directed at incels[15]. This became one of the largest topics of discussion across the entire incelosphere.

In mid-2019 love-shy.com took down their FAQ page on incels in a distancing attempt while also allowing their most extreme incels to stay on the site. Also, the same year a podcast devoted to incel topics by a non-incel was started called The Incel Project (Podcast), which has absolutely no association with the previous The Incel Project (Documentary).

On September 31st 2019, Reddit's "Braincels", one of the most popular and well-known incel forums was banned due to new rules being made by Reddit on the spot. Braincels was given no notice. Users moved to incels.co, incelistan.net, incelswithouthate, reddit.com/r/celouts, saidit.net/s/incels, or simply stopped using incel forums. Smaller forums went into high gear to attract Braincels users, however no mass exodus happened, leaving some wondering how many real users were on Braincels in the first place.

In March 2020 incelistan.net changed URL to yourenotalone.co as an homage to the defunct 2014 forum yourenotalone, the last site from the first incel community on the net. They then closed down not long afterward, making their site read-only, citing wanting a better forum software.

In April 2020, inceltears shut down with the message, "That's all folks, we're done", after a mod removed the rest of the mods then deleted their account.